If Sabina had known what was before her when she got into the Baroness
Volterra's carriage and was driven up to the Via Ludovisi, followed by
a cab with her luggage, she would probably have begged leave to go with
her elder sister to the convent. Her mother would most likely have
refused the permission, and she would have been obliged to accept the
Volterras' hospitality after all, but she would have had the
satisfaction of having made an effort to keep her freedom before
entering into what she soon looked upon as slavery.
Her mother would have considered this another evidence of the folly
inherent in all the Conti family. Sabina lived in a luxurious house,
she was treated with consideration, she saw her friends, and desirable
young men saw her. What more could she wish?
All this was true. The Baroness was at great pains to make much of her,
and the Baron's manner to her was at once flattering, respectful and
paternal. During the first few days she had discovered that if she
accidentally expressed the smallest wish it was instantly fulfilled,
and this was so embarrassing that she had since taken endless pains
never to express any wish at all. Moreover not the slightest allusion
to the misfortunes of her family was ever made before her, and if she
was in total ignorance of the state of affairs, she was at least spared
the humiliation of hearing that the palace was for sale, and might be
sold any day, to any one who would pay the price asked.
From time to time the Baroness said she hoped that Sabina had good news
of her mother, but showed no curiosity in the matter, and the girl
always answered that she believed her mother to be quite well. Indeed
she did believe it, for she supposed that if the Princess were ill some
one would let her know. She wrote stiff little letters herself, every
Sunday morning, and addressed them to her uncle's place in Poland; but
no one ever took the least notice of these conscientious
communications, and she wondered why she sent them, after all. It was a
remnant of the sense of duty to her parents instilled into her in the
convent, and she could not help clinging to it still, from habit.
She had a few friends of her own age, and they came to see her now and
then. They were mostly companions of her recent convent days, and they
asked her many questions, to most of which she had no answer. She
noticed that they looked surprised, but they were well brought up
girls, and kept their reflections to themselves, until they were at
home.
The Conti had fewer near relations than most Roman families, for of
late they had not been numerous. The Prince's only sister had died
childless, the dowager Princess was a Pole, and her daughter-in-law was
a Tuscan. Sabina and her generation had therefore no first cousins; and
those who were one degree or more removed were glad that they had not
been asked to take charge of the girl after the catastrophe. It would
have been all very well merely to give her a room and a place at table,
but the older ones shook their heads, and said that before long the
Baroness Volterra would have to dress her too, and give her
pocket-money. Her good-for-nothing brother would not do anything for
her, if he could, and the Princess, who was amusing herself in Poland,
if not in Paris, was capable of forgetting her existence for a year at
a time.
All these things greatly enhanced the outward and visible merit of the
Volterra couple, but made Sabina's position daily less endurable. So
the Baroness laid up treasures in heaven while Sabina unwillingly
stored trouble on earth.
She was proud, to begin with. It was bad enough to have been ordered by
her mother to accept the hospitality of people she did not like, but it
was almost unbearable to realize by degrees that she was living on
their effusive charity. If she had been as vain as she was proud, she
would probably have left their house to take refuge in her sister's
convent, for her vanity could not have borne the certainty that all
society knew what her position was. The foundation of pride is the wish
to respect oneself, whatever others may think; the mainspring of vanity
is the craving for the admiration of others, no matter at what cost to
one's self-respect. In the Conti family these qualities and defects
were unevenly distributed, for while pride seemed to have been left out
in the character of Sabina's brother, who was vain and arrogant, she
herself was as unspoilt by vanity as she was plentifully supplied with
the characteristic which is said to have caused Lucifer's fall, but
which has been the mainstay of many a greatly-tempted man and woman.
Perhaps what is a fault in angels may seem to be almost a virtue in
humanity, compared with the meanness of worse failings.
Sabina was not suspicious, yet she could not help wondering why the
Baroness had been so very anxious to take her in, and sometimes she
thought that the object might be to marry her to one of Volterra's two
sons. One was in a cavalry regiment stationed in Turin, the other was
in the diplomacy and was now in Washington. They were both doing very
well in their careers and their father and mother often talked of them.
The Baron was inclined to be playful now and then.
"Ah, my dear young lady," he would cry, shaking one fat finger at
Sabina across the dinner table, "take care, take care! You will lose
your heart to both my boys and sow discord in my family!"
At this he never failed to laugh, and his wife responded with a smile
of motherly pride, followed by a discreet side glance at Sabina's
delicate face. Then the finely-pencilled eyebrows were just the least
bit more arched for a second, and the slender neck grew slightly
straighter, but that was all, and the Baron did not even see the
change. Sometimes Sabina said nothing, but sometimes she asked if the
sons were coming home on leave. No, they were not coming at present. In
the spring Volterra and his wife generally spent a few weeks in Turin,
to see the elder son, on their way to Aix and Paris, but his brother
could hardly expect to come home for another year. Then the couple
would talk about both the young men, until Sabina's attention wandered,
and she no longer heard what they were saying.
She did not believe that they really thought of trying to marry her to
one of the sons. In her own opinion they could gain nothing by it; she
had no dowry now, and her mother had always talked of marriage as a
business transaction. It did not occur to her that they could care to
be allied with a ruined family, and that her mere name could be worth
anything in their scale of values. They were millionaires, of course,
and even the dowry which she might formerly have expected would have
been nothing compared with their fortune; but her mother had always
said that rich people were the very people who cared the most for
money. That was the reason why they were rich. This explanation was so
logical that Sabina had accepted it as the true one.
Her knowledge of the world was really limited to what she had learned
from her mother, after she had come back from the convent six months
before the crash, and it was an odd mixture of limitations and
exaggerations. When the Princess was in a good humour she believed in
everybody; when she was not, which was when she had no money to throw
away, she attributed the basest motives to all mankind. According to
her moods, she had encouraged Sabina to look forward to a life of
perpetual pleasure, or had assured her with energy that all men were
liars, and that the world was a wretched place after all. It was true
that the Princess entertained the cheerful view more often than not,
which was perhaps fortunate for her daughter; but in her heart the
young girl felt that she would have to rely on her own common sense to
form any opinion of life, and as her position became more difficult,
while the future did not grow more defined, she tried to think
connectedly about it all, and to reach some useful conclusion.
It was not easy. In her native city, living under the roof of people
who held a strong position in the society to which she belonged, though
they had not been born to it, she was as completely isolated as if she
had been suddenly taken away and set down amongst strangers in
Australia. She was as lonely as she could have been on a desert island.
The Volterra couple were radically, constitutionally, congenitally
different from the men and women she had seen in her mother's house.
She could not have told exactly where the difference lay, for she was
too young, and perhaps too simple. She did not instinctively like them,
but she had never really felt any affection for her mother either, and
her own brother and sister had always repelled her. Her mother had
sometimes treated her like a toy, but more often as a nuisance and a
hindrance in life, to be kept out of the way as much, as possible, and
married off on the first opportunity. Yet Sabina knew that far down in
her nature there was a mysterious tie of some sort, an intuition that
often told her what her mother would say or do, though she herself
would have spoken and acted otherwise. She had felt it even with her
brother and sister, but she could not feel it at all with the Baron or
his wife. She never could guess what they might do or say under the
most ordinary circumstances, nor what things they would like and
dislike, nor how they would regard anything she said or did; least of
all could she understand why they were so anxious to keep her with them.
It was all a mystery, but life itself was mysterious, and she was
little more than a child in years though she had never had what one
calls a real childhood.
She often used to sit by her window, the sliding blinds partly drawn
together, but leaving a space through which she could look down at the
city, with a glimpse of Saint Peter's in the distance against the warm
haze of the low Campagna. Rome seemed as far from her then as if she
saw it in a vision a thousand miles away, and the very faint sounds
from the distance were like voices in a dream. Then, if she closed her
eyes a moment, she could see the dark streets about the Palazzo Conti,
and the one open corner of the palace, high up in the sunlight; she
could smell the acrid air that used to come up to her in the early
morning when the panes were opened, damp and laden with odours not
sweet but familiar in the heart of Rome; odours compounded of cabbages,
stables, cheese and mud, and occasionally varied by the fumes of
roasting coffee, or the sour vapours from a wine cart that was
unloading stained casks, all wet with red juice, at the door of the
wine shop far below, a dark little wine shop with a dry bush stuck out
through a smoky little grated window, and a humble sign displaying the
prices of drink in roughly painted blue and red figures. For her room
had looked upon the narrowest and darkest of the streets, though it had
been stately enough within, and luxuriously furnished, besides
containing some objects of value and beauty over which there would be
much bidding and squabbling of amateurs and experts when the great sale
took place.
It had been gloomy and silent and loveless, the life down there; and
yet she would have gone back to it if she could, from the sunshine of
the Via Ludovisi, and from the overpowering freshness of the Volterra
house, where everything was modern, and polished, and varnished, and in
perfect condition, suggesting that things had been just paid for. She
had not liked the old life, but she liked her present surroundings even
less, and at times she felt a furious longing to leave them suddenly,
without warning; to go out when no one would notice her, and never to
come back; to go she knew not where, out into the world, risking she
knew not what, a high-born, penniless, fair-haired girl not yet
eighteen.
What would happen, if she did? She rarely laughed, but she would laugh
at that, when she thought of the consternation her flight would
produce. How puzzled the fat Baron would look, how the Baroness's thin
mouth would be drawn down at the corners! How the invisible silk
bellows would puff as she ran up and down stairs, searching the house
for Sabina!
There was more than one strain of wild blood in the delicate girl's
veins, and the spring had come suddenly, with a bursting out of blossom
and life and colour, and a twittering of nesting birds in the old
gardens, and a rush of strange longings in her heart.
Then Sabina told herself that there was nothing to keep her where she
was, but her own will, and that no one would really care what became of
her in the wide world; certainly not her mother, who had never written
her so much as a line, nor sent her a message, since they had parted on
the day of the catastrophe; certainly not her brother; probably not
even her sister, whose whole being was absorbed in the tyrannical
government of what she called her soul. Sabina, in her thoughts,
irreverently compared Clementina's soul to a race-horse, and her sister
to a jockey, riding it cruelly with whip and spur to the goal of
salvation, whether it liked it or not.
Sabina rose from her seat by the window, when she thought of liberty,
and she walked up and down her room, driven by something she could not
understand, and yet withheld by something she understood even less. For
it was not fear, nor reflection, nor even common sense nor the thought
of giving pain to any one that hindered her from leaving the house at
such moments. It was not even the memory of the one human being who had
hitherto loved her, and for whom she had felt affection and
gratitude,--one of the nuns at the convent school, a brave, quiet
little lady who made her believe in good. She meant to do no harm if
she were free, and the nun would not really blame her, if she knew the
truth.
It was not that. It was the secret conviction that there was harm in
the world from which mere courage could not protect her; it was the
sort of instinct that warns young animals not to eat plants that are
poisonous; it was the maiden intuition of a strange and unknown danger.
She sat down again disconsolately. It was absurd, of course, and she
could not run away. Where could she go? She had no money, and she would
have to starve or beg before one day was out. She would be homeless,
she would be driven to some house of charity, for a meal and a place to
sleep, or else to sleep out under the sky. That would be delightful for
once. She had always longed to sleep out of doors, to feel the breeze
playing with her feathery hair in the dark, to watch the constellations
turning slowly westwards, to listen to the night sounds, to the low
rhythmical piping of the tree toad, the sorrowful cry of the little
southern owl and the tolling of the hour in a far-off belfry.
But it might rain. At the idea, Sabina laughed again. It would be very
unpleasant to be caught in a shower while napping on a bench in a
public garden. Besides, if the policemen found her there, an extremely
young lady, extremely well dressed but apparently belonging to no one,
they would in all likelihood ask her name, and she would have to tell
them who she was; and then she would be brought back to Baron
Volterra's house, unless they thought it more prudent to take her to a
lunatic asylum.
At that stage in her imaginings it was generally time to go out with
the Baroness for the daily drive, which began with the leaving of cards
and notes, then led to the country or one of the villas, and generally
ended in a turn or two through the Corso before coming home. The worst
part of the daily round was dinner when the Baron was at home. It was
then that she felt most strongly the temptation to slip out of the
house and never to come back. Often, however, he and his wife dined
out, and then Sabina was served alone by two solemn men-servants, so
extremely correct that they reminded her a little of her old home.
These were the pleasantest evenings she spent during that spring, for
when dinner was over she was free to go to her own room and curl
herself up in a big armchair with a book, and read or dream till
bedtime, as she pleased.
When she was alone, her life seemed less objectless, less inexplicably
empty, less stupidly incomprehensible, less lonely than in the company
of those excellent people with whom she had nothing in common, but to
whom she felt that she was under a great obligation. In their company,
it was as if her life had stopped suddenly at the beginning and was
never to go on again, as if she had stuck fast like a fly in a drop of
amber, as if nothing of interest could ever happen to her though she
might live a hundred years.
She could hardly remember anything which had given her great pleasure.
She did not remember to have been ever radiantly happy, though she
could not recall much unhappiness since she had left the convent
school. The last thing that had really hurt her had been the death of
her pet canary, and she had kept her feelings to herself as well as she
could, with the old aristocratic instinct of hiding pain.
It was all idle and strangely empty, and yet hard to understand. She
would have been much surprised if she could have guessed how much its
emptiness interested other people in Rome; how the dowagers chattered
about her over their tea, abusing her mother and all her relations for
abandoning her like a waif; how the men reasoned about Baron Volterra's
deep-laid schemes, trying to make out that his semi-adoption of Sabina,
as they called it, must certainly bode ruin to some one, since he had
never in his life done anything without a financial object; how the
young girls unanimously declared that the Baroness wanted Sabina for
one of her sons, because she was such a dreadful snob; how Cardinal
Della Crusca shook his wise old head knowingly, as he, who knew so
much, always did on the rare occasions when he knew nothing about the
matter in hand; how a romantic young English secretary of Embassy
christened her the Princess in the Tower; and how old Pompeo Sassi went
up to his vineyard on Monte Mario every Sunday and Thursday and sat
almost all the afternoon under the chestnut-tree thinking about her and
making unpractical plans of his own.